


Stillness

by Trobadora



Category: Doctor Who, Torchwood
Genre: Children of Earth, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-15
Updated: 2009-07-15
Packaged: 2017-10-06 19:45:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trobadora/pseuds/Trobadora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>This is the moment when something breaks.</i> - Post-<i>Children of Earth</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stillness

**Author's Note:**

> For the Winter Companions [Summer Holidays](http://community.livejournal.com/wintercompanion/74237.html) fest, prompt 11: future - carry on - purpose - trial.

_Captain Jack Harkness, Defender of the Earth._ Had such a nice ring to it, didn't it?

But at what cost?

The Doctor stands at the edge of the crater, staring at the rubble, the remains of the Hub.

A cold fist is clenching his stomach, clenching his hearts.

He hadn't been there. Hadn't had a choice – hadn't known about any of this until it was too late. Communications blocked, and time itself? His Time Lord senses had been no help at all. Even now the timelines are hopelessly tangled, as they often are around Jack.

The Doctor might normally notice a major event like this, but around Jack, there's no such thing as normal. There's no telling whether something's going on, not from a distance. Not even for a Time Lord.

Now it's too late, and all that's left is grief. There's nothing he can do here, now.

Nothing at all.

Gwen hasn't said so, but it's clear enough: Jack is out there somewhere, trying to find oblivion, trying to find a way to live because he can't stop living.

Because he has no choice.

In the Doctor's head, a voice echoes: _I refuse._ The Master, rejecting the future, rejecting himself. Choosing his own end.

No, Jack wouldn't do that, even if he could. But sometimes _having_ that choice makes all the difference. The Doctor knows only too well.

Even Time Lords are not immortal. Even regeneration is ultimately a choice. And it matters that it is: The Doctor's been there himself. Even at the end of the Time War, his people, his own family erased from history as if they'd never been, he alone left to bear witness, even when he could barely look his new self in the face, he'd always known he was choosing to live.

It's always a choice. You choose to live, every day you go on, every day you continue.

Jack doesn't even have that much. He is propelled forward, with or against his will. It makes no difference. He _lives_.

The Doctor looks up at the rainy Cardiff sky, extending his senses.

Jack is immoveable. Fixed. He's a Fact; nothing will, nothing _can_ alter that. The universe - time and space - will bend around him: He cannot be changed, so they must.

The Doctor can feel him, always. Jack is the magnetic north for a Time Lord's senses, the North Star of temporal mechanics. Time changes everything; Jack alone remains untouched. He's the stillness at the centre of time itself. When the Doctor concentrates, he can feel the universe spinning around that centre. He can feel the timelines circling, twisting and bending, splitting and joining, forming beautiful fractal patterns around Truth's event horizon.

When he's feeling whimsical, the Doctor imagines his own species developing with _that_ in existence. It would have been their beacon, their guiding light. A world, a mythology, a culture built around that Fact. How would they have reacted, discovering who and what it truly was? How would they have dealt with the knowledge?

Truth itself, embodied in a mere human.

Even a Time Lord can hardly comprehend it. Even a Time Lord ran away rather than acknowledge the impossible, accept the immutable, the Fact that never should have been.

But Jack is human. He lives, he feels, he breathes – and that small human mind has to live with what he's become, has to carry eternity and bear it somehow. Even a Time Lord would stagger; even a Time Lord would break.

He imagines, for a moment: Every terrible thing he sees, every terrible thing he does - he'll always know there will be _more_. Because there is no end; there is never an end. There is only this: eternity, stretching ahead of him. And nowhere to run.

Time Lords aren't mortal in the human sense, but after many lifetimes, they do have an end. Infinity is beyond them. But Jack must carry it. He must; even if he breaks, even if everything in him splinters, he has no choice.

He must go on.

This? This is just one of those moments: One of those moments when something breaks.

And there is nothing, nothing at all he can do.

Except perhaps later, when Jack is ready.

When everything that can break has broken, and there is nothing else left, there is a moment of grace. A moment when you stop. Stop looking, even for pain, even for oblivion.

Jack is not there yet, but he will be.

And when that last shard of self shatters, the Doctor will be there. This he swears to himself.

Perhaps then, he can help him pick up the pieces.

Perhaps.


End file.
